Tuesday, April 19, 2011

I Write Because I Don't Want to Die



What would I do if the doctor gave me six months to live? I'd type faster.

(Isaac Asimov)



Some of you – possibly as many as none – might have noticed that I missed my regular posting deadline last week. This was occasioned by personal circumstances that I’m not going to discuss here quite yet, although my partner and I felt comfortable with sharing them on another forum. At any rate, my failure to update the blog didn’t prevent it from attracting its largest weekly reader numbers ever, and by quite some margin. So I’m going to start from that this week, and what it says about where and to whom these writings belong.

***

With the wisdom imparted by nearly three years of blogging, I have largely given up trying to anticipate what will prove popular and what won’t, as I am more frequently wrong than I am right. But even so the success of the post in question – on Richard Scarry’s book What Do People Do All Day? – has really surprised me: especially since it expanded on a recurring topic, I vaguely anticipated that it might interest some of my regular readers and be over in the course of its allotted week. Not so. On week one, it did the rounds mainly on Twitter: concentric ripples that you could almost trace in graphical form, followed by more intricate lines zig-zagging across the Atlantic and occasionally leaping back to this part of the world. Then came James Bridle's booktwo. Then Bobulate and, a week or so later, Kottke and the Ideas section of The Boston Globe. I confess I had never heard of the middle two, but to put them in perspective, Bobulate has two and a half times as many subscribers of the most widely subscribed New Zealand blog [1]; Kottke, nearly fifty times as many. That would be over 57,000 people through Google Reader alone.

I couldn’t begin to credibly extrapolate how many actual regular readers that translates into, except I have a very precise idea of what happens when the blog owner is kind enough to point to something you’ve written. More ripples, but vastly amplified this time, via dozens of tweets and retweets and hundreds of Facebook ‘shares’. Yet nothing that leaves a trace, unlike in the old media: no print runs that get sold out, no physical displacement of resources or tangible, material effect on the physical world. Since the traffic produced very few comments, were it not for the fact that I keep site statistics I wouldn’t even know about it. But always these events affect the writing space, changing the makeup of its readership and therefore the sense of what belongs in it.

In my case, it used to be that the majority of this blog’s regulars came from New Zealand. Now it’s the US first, followed by Britain. I have no control over this, although I suppose that if I were perverse enough I could attempt to put off those overseas readers by writing more local content unlikely to be understood without the appropriate keys. But then I am not from here either, so I would likely alienate New Zealanders even more with my clumsy overreaching. Conversely, I have more readers from France and Germany than my native Italy, a situation I would dearly love to reverse – if only I knew how. Locally accented content alone doesn’t do it, although I’d probably do well to ask myself why I never blog in Italian and see where that takes me. But so long as one persists in writing in the lingua franca, there will always be a pull towards the old imperial centres, where the networks are denser and the blogs and Twitter feeds have a following that easily dwarfs the most popular of our own.

And so it strikes me that the liking and the sharing are also a form of appropriation; that what is being selected by a handful of Great Aggregators or Super Readers are the posts most likely to appeal to the largest and most seamlessly connected cultural networks; and that when it happens to be a fragment of the arguments I am trying to develop on these pages that gets promoted via this highly sophisticated process of selection, by then it’s too late, not to mention churlish, for me to worry about how it could be perceived in isolation. It was mine, briefly, but now it’s gone. Voiceless, anonymised, anthologised along with the many other thousands of fragments that are liked or shared every minute of every day, it will mean what the great text that is the internet in its Anglo-American inflection allows it to mean.

***

Or so goes the argument that I’m more or less conditioned to make. But the reverse is also true, if not in fact truer: that even to the extent that liking and sharing are a form of appropriation, the author of a blog maintains a high degree of control over his or her writing space; and that in the act of returning, a fraction of the new readers accept to enter into a conversation on topics that don’t lend themselves so readily to global or even cross-cultural consumption, such as the history of social welfare in New Zealand. Furthermore – and this to my mind is a key point – those connections run both ways. And so it’s not just that we can read Iranian bloggers, but also that they can read us, and that we all write each other. This worldwide para-space occupied by people who more and more frequently are at the same time readers and writers is a genuinely new thing, and sometimes the only sane response to its staggering capacity to promote and disseminate texts is simply to marvel at it, as we do when we come across somebody who sits comfortably at the crossroads of culture.

I will return to some of these ideas when I deal with Jaron Lanier’s critique of the social web, but if I may I’d like to interrogate my own place in all of this today, at the cost of indulging in one of those ghastly ‘why I blog’ posts roundly and rightly mocked some time ago by Paul Litterick. Because I don’t mind telling you, in spite of some of the foregoing, that I’m most of all pleased whenever somebody bothers to share something I’ve written. And it’s not just that I have an ego or that I want to be liked, nor that I still find this gig so utterly unlikely, my being allowed to write every week to an actual audience, that ultimately I need to be reassured that it’s okay because look, somebody actually reads the stuff. It’s also that all of these acts map networks of shared interest that in themselves give meaning to the writing, in a process that is rendered more valuable by its being visible and concrete. (And the names on blog rolls operate in a similar way, making visible a more permanent set of connections.)

Without these, without the possibility of making and reading into such connections, I couldn’t really conceive of keeping a blog, and without blogging I’m not sure I could have pursued writing, in this or any other medium. Owen Hatherley alluded to this in one of the most generous write ups ever received by this blog, when he suggested that a certain kind of columnist has been ‘pushed online by the vagaries of wordcounts and networks both technological and institutional’. This is probably true, but the flip side is that I doubt I could in fact have become that columnist in print – not without the apprenticeship.

And so we come to the part that suspiciously resembles a ‘why I blog’ statement. How the hell did I get myself into this? Well, it’s too late now.

For some reason I think quite often about this one sentence from a book by Guido Almansi called La ragion comica, The Comic Reason: Rido soprattutto perché non voglio morire. 'I laugh mostly because I don’t want to die.' I don’t have the book to hand and have since forgotten whether it was a quotation from somebody else, or what Almansi’s general argument even was at that point. It just sits there. Then I go back to a line that I never developed, about how writing doesn’t take time, it makes time. I have come to believe that this is probably true. And the other part, too: that writing can be both a strategy for deferral and a source of pleasure. Joy, even.

I write mostly because I don’t want to die. I’m not even sure what that means, except that I thought of that line while I was preoccupied with something far more important than writing, and while this other thing that I wrote briefly got a life of its own.





[1] A note on the method is probably in order here. There is one piece of public information that can give a rough idea of the relative regular readership of two or more blogs, and it's the number of Google Reader subscribers. It's a far from perfect piece of data - it tends for instance to penalise blogs that don't syndicate the full feed or push particular alternative forms of subscriptions, such as mailing lists or livejournal or blogger following. Public Address for instance is certainly underrepresented by this statistic, which is why when I say 'the most widely subscribed New Zealand blog' (ie Kiwiblog), you shouldn't quote me on it. But that's likely the order of magnitude anyhow.


13 comments:

Douglas Kretzmann said...

"I write mostly because I don’t want to die."

Poemas had a meditation on the 'written on water' idea and notes 'the text written on a transient or unfathomable material.. already evokes the idea of eternity just as naturally as that of vanity'
The weblog-sphere is surely both transient and unfathomable..

I know my father wrote in order not to die, at some level. My name is from the Scots for 'black water': perhaps for this reason or others it does not bother me to become only black water, so the words become ripples then nothing.

"writing doesn’t take time, it makes time"
That's exactly it. Writing takes a meaningless flow of events and puts it into order, order that is not merely sequence, just as music takes time and turns it into meaning.

I am sorry to hear of your tribulations.. we are having visitors from the antipodes later this month, with a child who has not yet learnt how to eat. I give thanks every day for the undeserved good fortune of healthy children..

Marian said...

I loved this. Thank you. I write mostly because there are things I want to work out for myself before I die. And I'm aware that time's running out, so I go hard. And I'm fascinated by your experience of who reads your blog, which is similar to mine with my blog and its associated Facebook page. The things that I find most exciting, readers seem to find less exciting! Am often surprised by the numbers, so unpredictable, and am interested that two-thirds are from outside Australasia.

Unknown said...

More life to you Mr. Giovanni.

James Butler said...

"I write mostly because I don’t want to die."

I think many bloggers, like other writers, are driven to seek fame (in the Gilgamesh/Iliad sense). Which is the same thing I guess.

Giovanni Tiso said...

@James
I find it useful to think of online writing (like any other sort of writing) as the maintaning of a separate identity, which needs to be known in order to exist- hence it draws a social sustenance. But the reason why I introduced Almansi's sentence is that it directos out attention to the act itself - which, by analogy, invites us to think of the act of writing as a means of processing reality, like Marian I think is suggesting. Yet one rarely laughs out loud on one's own - that act too draws sustenance by being shared with others. And so on the social web we LOL, or we write, and they both contribute to this other life, socially constructed. Fame is central to it, although people call it online reputation these days, and charge you hundreds of dollars per seminar to help you look after it.

Giovanni Tiso said...

@Marian

I write mostly because there are things I want to work out for myself before I die. And I'm aware that time's running out, so I go hard.

I really needed an epigraph on this thing, didn't I? Fixed now.

Giovanni Tiso said...

@Douglas
Poemas had a meditation on the 'written on water' idea and notes 'the text written on a transient or unfathomable material.. already evokes the idea of eternity just as naturally as that of vanity'
The weblog-sphere is surely both transient and unfathomable..


Thank you for reminding me of that piece. There are references in the comments there to Borges’ story The Book of Sand, which is also, fittingly, the name of a no longer updated but in its heyday very interesting blog on how we keep time in the digital era. And then there’s Francesca’s excellent Buchi nella sabbia, holes in the sand, an Italian polyglot blog I found (naturally) via Poemas that is full of meditations on the (im)permanence of writing.

I know my father wrote in order not to die, at some level.

It was when I wrote about my father (who didn’t write, nor travelled very far) that I was first exposed to the process of dissemination I describe in the post, and its geography took on a special significance.

Emma said...

Lovely. Lovely. So lovely.

Matthew Littlewood said...

Lovely entry. I must admit, I shared your post on Richard Scarry on my facebook and it got quite the positive response. As you said, you may have written about those themes before, but there was the childlike nostalgia element (I definitely remember reading those books as a child) that I found strangely moving.

As an aside, have you ever considered writing for arts magazines or the like? Or do you already? I certainly enjoy your style, and the way it seems quite flexible- sometimes strident, sometimes analytical, sometimes whimsical, and sometimes a mix of all those. Keep up the good work.

Unknown said...

I wholeheartedly agree Matthew.

Giovanni Tiso said...

I must admit, I shared your post

Admit away! I realise it did sound like I was moaning about it somewhat. So thank you.

As an aside, have you ever considered writing for arts magazines or the like?

I would love to. My strategy on this front thus far has been that the editors of these publications have to approach me directly, preferably by phoning me and kindly not at mealtimes. Then I take some time to consider their offers. Sometimes they have to insist. Evidently I worry that seeking them out myself or pitching ideas or otherwise seeming too eager to them might be beneath me.

Surprisingly, this approach hasn’t resulted in many sales.

But seriously, how you transition into other, more mainstream publications with their old economic and distribution models or otherwise ‘monetise’ your efforts (as Blogger and Google periodically insist that you should) is something to consider once one has established a readership, and becomes more of a pressing question when you get a big spike in reader numbers. The transition is only as complicated as you make it, really, but I’m fascinated by some of its implications in term of how you conceptualise this other identity that writing constructs. Amateurism in this respect can function as a protective cocoon, as is my (evidently incorrect) insistence that a piece of writing on these pages cannot be accessed or appreciated unless one has read the previous instalments, which is another way of saying that what I write could only work here, in this space that I control. But I am in fact making some forays - I’ll post the details here as they occur.

Lyndon said...

I hardly dare imagine what thoughts on internet geography this might set in train, but ReadWriteWeb has been considered a New Zealand blog.

Writing takes a meaningless flow of events and puts it into order, order that is not merely sequence, just as music takes time and turns it into meaning.

Parallels a thought on stories I over-briefly expressed in the context of not satirising earthquakes. Though in referring people to that post I want to say that I envy Giovanni his comments section.

AngonaMM said...

Fascinating stuff. Cheers to you! (I tend to mull over what i say, and first time up, it often says anything but what I really want to say -- so ... I am what you'd call a "slow worker" ... & therefore unsuited to blog posts that people might expect to appear regularly). Hats off to you and thanks for the clear writing.